The Ship of Riddles and the Full Scale Falcon Project

‘Full Scale Falcon is a quest to build the ultimate Star Wars prop: a 1:1 scale ESB/ANH hybrid Millennium Falcon with complete, correctly scaled interior. Yes, I have completely lost my mind, just like most of my friends and family say.’ Going one step further than the members of the Millennium Falcon Builders Club, the FSF Project is almost a piece of land art:

I own a secluded 88 acre tract of wooded land where we’ll be building. We have selected a site on the property that is low enough so that the top of the Falcon can be seen easily from several vantage points. A flat area roughly 400? x 400? is being cleared. And yes, I am aware that it will eventually show up on Google Earth and Google Maps. I’m counting on that.

But that’s not all. For the Falcon is a spatial impossibility, a House Of Leaves/Tardis that shows the fundamental trickery inherent in cinematography and the perils of subjecting a film set to intense, relentless scrutiny over a period of decades (someone did this last year for The Shining, neatly rebutted by John August in Cinematic geography and the problem of genius). Back to the Falcon:

‘Perhaps the saddest day of my Star Wars fan-life was the realisation that the Millennium Falcon interiors CANNOT be matched to the exterior. The rush job, sadly, meant that glaring inconsistencies arose between the interior and exterior of the vessel. The exterior set was built BEFORE the models were finished, and ended up about 40% too small!’.

That last link is from an exhaustive (and archived) site, The Ship of Riddles. In the years since it was archived, much of its visual source material has been reproduced elsewhere, at larger scale. Check Wookiepedia for an exhaustive page of Falcon info and a simple image search yields untold visual riches. while sites like i09 host huge galleries taken from books like Starwars: the Art of Ralph Mcquarrie. These 1978 sketches (see image above) show the production company was aware of the spatial disturbance in the force represented by the ship’s interior and exterior. Whether the Full Scale Falcon team can reconcile spatial geometry and fandom remains to be seen.